* a VM has been donated from [[Stefan]] inside the WirelessAntwerp network near <del>Keyserley</del> that street where there used to be big trees near Central Station, but which is transformed into a construction site for the next 42 years.

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* Debian 6 has been installed and all patches are applied (unless they give out new patches, then you'll need to apply patches again)

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* x2go has been installed and is in fully working condition

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* Smuxi has been installed to use as an IRC client, defaulting to #hackerspace-voidwarranties with the nick "barputer-next".

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* Google Chrome has been installed as the default web browser. Some plugins (read: Flash) can be a pain in the *ss to install under Linux, and Chrome has it built-in. Also, it's a lot easier to handle than Firefox, and it works faster (to me).

Revision as of 09:59, 8 February 2012

Contents

Outline

Rebuilt the barputer

Prevent that hardware failure will make El Presidente get no Mate (and you know what happens if he doesn't get his Club-Mate on time)

(attempt to) optimize it.

Concept

Since the barputer lives in a pretty harsh environment, a backup strategy is required. The last one left us at a moment whe didn't expect it to fail, and accounting is an issue for those who pay their drinks monthly. My idea was to put the barputer and related software in a VM (without Apache <= 2.2.19, or even without Apache at all), and access it remotely. I recently starded exploring x2go. X2go is somewhat like a RDP alternative for linux, a free/OSS version of NXServer.

The advantages of x2go/NX are:

low bandwidth required to use the desktop remotely (important, because network connections tend to get slow sometimes in the space)

(almost) platform independent

The disadvantages are:

it has a built in YouTube-Be-Gone, which you can only disable by throwing extra bandwidth at it.

OS X only has a PowerPC client officially (to bad for you Lion users...), but there's a workaround which doesn't involve downgrading to Snow Leo, or screwing up your system by putting Lion+Snow Leo in a blender and run that on your Mac. It will blend, but getting it to work is another issue.

What has been done?

a VM has been donated from Stefan inside the WirelessAntwerp network near Keyserley that street where there used to be big trees near Central Station, but which is transformed into a construction site for the next 42 years.

Debian 6 has been installed and all patches are applied (unless they give out new patches, then you'll need to apply patches again)

x2go has been installed and is in fully working condition

Smuxi has been installed to use as an IRC client, defaulting to #hackerspace-voidwarranties with the nick "barputer-next".

Google Chrome has been installed as the default web browser. Some plugins (read: Flash) can be a pain in the *ss to install under Linux, and Chrome has it built-in. Also, it's a lot easier to handle than Firefox, and it works faster (to me).